DB examples corrupted? and other questions

[David Vaughan]

On Sunday, Jul 13, 2003, at 11:41 Australia/Sydney, Richard Gaskin 
<ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
>
> David Vaughan wrote:
snip
>> - ...and of course I could just do it in Rev as my DB size, while not
>> very small, does not push limits (<10,000 records, <10MB).
>
> The 10,000-record "limit" is by no means absolute, and can be greatly
> exceeded depending on how your data is stored.

Richard

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. I meant that I expected my project to 
have fewer than 10K records etc, not that I envisaged some practical 
limit at that size. Your following comments on the options are very 
interesting.
>
> The trick is to put tables in simple tab-delimited text in a variable
> rather than in fields on cards.  The latter is where bulk and 
> performance
> issues come from:  the engine needs to make a text record structure 
> for each
> field on every card along with a card record structure in addition to 
> the
> data itself.  Plus, accessing data in a field is almost always much 
> slower
> than grabbing an item from a line in a block of text.
>
> The downside to this simple text-based approach is that you have to 
> write
> your own routines for anything you need.
>
> The upside is that you can use simple chunk expressions so it's easy 
> to do.
>
> If the overall size of the data is something that can be managed in 
> RAM,
> RAM-based solutions are hard to beat for speed over paged disk reads.

I have the RAM so give or take some data integrity issues I will think 
further about that approach. It might wind up coming to a speed test, 
or building a version in which I isolate data selection and update so 
the back end is substitutable

regards
David
>
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Media Corporation